by Sergey Shabohin
Reliquary XX–XXI
Reliquary XX–XXI is a series of double showcase-obituaries, where significant works of 20th and 21st-century art appear as relics – artifacts forcibly placed within the grid of time. Each reliquary, divided into one hundred cells, functions as a chronological archive: each cell contains a fragment of a work or crumpled reproductions of pieces created by artists who passed away in that specific year. Thus, the series engages with the tradition of preserving saintly relics, but unlike religious reliquaries, it does not uphold a cult – it exposes the very act of dissection, distribution, and fragmentation of the whole into the dispersed. Like reliquaries in churches, these necrologies fixate on the bodily decay of the artists themselves and the finitude of their art. At the end of each year, the corresponding cell is supplemented with the “remains” – fragments or reproductions of works by an artist who died that year.
The already filled cells create a dense grid of loss, yet the empty spaces ahead seem just as significant: they both terrify and inspire, leaving room for the future. The series highlights the absurdity of worship mechanics, brought to its logical extreme – the way saintly relics are fragmented and disseminated across the world's churches. But if the value of art, like that of faith, lies not in its materiality but in its "energy," does it then make sense to fragment it as well, making it equally accessible to all? This grotesque act of "artistic dismemberment" serves as a critique of institutions where the material, symbolic, and spiritual nature of art is subordinated to the logic of blind fanaticism and commercialization.
The reliquary installations and specially designed archive-websites within the series are filled with works on different themes. This series is at once a chronicle, a museum, and a manifesto. It fixes loss within the rigid grid of time, where memory preserves while simultaneously destroying. It is not merely a catalog of losses but a system of meanings, in which art speaks not only of its content but of its very mode of existence.
– from Every Day I Talk to the Dead & Alive Artists cycle –
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Artists Index
Versions
2009
Version 1: Obituaries
The first version of the reliquaries from 2009 consisted of two tables, on which fragments of works by artists who passed away before 2009 were placed without any specific thematic connection. This work was part of the cycle Every Day I Talk to the Dead & Alive Artists and was a part of a larger installation exploring the death of the author and critiquing the collapsed system of art.
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2024 (since 2009)
Version 2: La mort de l’auteur
This version of Reliquary XX–XXI features two reliquaries filled with crumpled reproductions of self-portraits by artists who died in various years. These distorted images become a literal metaphor for the “death of the author” (la mort de l’auteur, Barth) – a final attempt to mark one’s presence, to outlive disappearance. Inside the compressed cells are not simply faces, but gestures of desperate self-reflection – a pre-death gaze turned toward the future. In this context, the self-portrait becomes a farewell letter, a cast of the transition between life, art, and memory.
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2025 (since 2009)
Version 3: Thanatos Archive
The third version of the Reliquary XX–XXI series – Thanatos Archive – gathers works that not only reflect on death, but anticipate it, framing the artistic gesture as an act of memory and contemplation of mortality. Here, the postulate memento mori – "remember death" – functions not only as a theme, but as an aesthetic principle. Thanatos Archive is not just a metaphor, but a literal registration of the artist’s death and the death of their work. Art appears as a prophecy of its own ending: loss becomes not a result, but a premonition, taking the shape of foreknowledge. The reliquaries thus turn into archival capsules where death is catalogued, identified, and inscribed into the structure of memory. This becomes one of the key manifestos of the entire series, asserting the finitude of art as its deepest condition.
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2025 (since 2009)
Version 4: Eros Embers
This version of Reliquary XX–XXI is dedicated to the imagery of Eros as an embodiment of corporeal vitality, eroticism, sexuality, desire, candor, and love – sensual forms that most acutely resist disappearance. The fragments preserved here are embers of Eros: smoldering remains of passion, capable of igniting once more, yet now refracted through a posthumous lens. Eros does not merely oppose erasure – it acknowledges its nearness, confronting Thanatos at its core. In this reliquary, the sexual becomes both an act of remembrance and of farewell; artistic candor transforms into a final, desperate celebration of life – searing, fragile, and fated to turn to ash.
In Progress
2025 (since 2009)
Version 5: Self-Reflective Necrology
Part of Reliquary XX–XXI. Version 5: Self-Reflective Necrology collects fragments of works that reflect on the themes of memory, archiving, collecting, and preservation. These works are directly or indirectly related to systematization and cataloging, repetition and time, cells and grids. Themes such as memory, archival compartments, recurring structures, lost and preserved elements, the authorial museum, and the method of total archiving are all central here. In these reliquaries, an attempt is made to preserve not only the works themselves, but also the very idea of memory, the structure of art, and the methodology of its creation.
In Progress
2025 (since 2009)
Version 6: Bird Conclave
Bird Conclave, the sixth version of Reliquary XX–XXI, brings together fragments of works by 20th- and 21st-century artists who depicted birds not as subjects, but as messengers of death, omens, and avatars of themselves. Referencing Marcel Broodthaers’s Musée d’Art Moderne – Département des Aigles, the work draws on mythic figures like Simurgh, Phoenix, and angels, forming a visual conclave of premonition and disappearance. Here, the bird becomes a surrogate for the artist – a mark of loss and a gesture toward memory.
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2025 (since 2009)
Version 7: Unpatriarchal Remains
Reliquary XX–XXI. Version 7: Unpatriarchal Remains brings together fragments of works by women artists whose practices critically examine patriarchal structures – militarism, heroization, and masculine norms. These reliquaries register not only the physical deaths of the artists, but also the symbolic erosion of patriarchy as a normative framework within art history. In the context of an historically rigid, hierarchical, and exclusionary artistic system, each surviving trace of a female voice becomes all the more valuable: here, the voice emerges as a remain – something that has miraculously endured. These fragments speak both of disappearance and of the insufficiency of representation. Yet the reliquaries also mark a temporal shift: with each passing decade, with each new layer of the archival grid, the resonance of the feminine grows louder. From scattered whispers to manifestos, from overlooked gestures to a politics of visibility – Unpatriarchal Remains charts not only a history of loss, but also a trajectory of amplification.
In Progress
2025 (since 2009)
Version 8: Icon Dust
Reliquary XX–XXI. Version 8: Icon Dust focuses on works in which artists turned to religion and spiritual imagery – addressing symbolism, cults, and belief systems, including iconography, rituals, and sacred objects. These pieces were created in an attempt to comprehend the afterlife, to quiet fear, to seek consolation – but after the artists’ own deaths, they became fragments enclosed within reliquaries, as if the images they once invoked had crumbled into dust. Icon Dust is the residue of faith: the remnants of belief transformed into matter, a trace not of salvation, but of the attempt to believe.
In Progress
2025 (since 2009)
Version 9: Queer Traces
Reliquary XX–XXI. Version 9: Queer Traces approaches the archive of death through a queer lens – through gazes, gestures, and bodies long kept outside the frame of normativity. It gathers fragments of works by artists engaged with homoeroticism, transgression, vulnerability, and a refusal of binary hierarchies. The homoerotic presence in these reliquaries resists the traditional male gaze: instead of objectification, it offers another kind of desire – not conquest, but touch. These fragments mark queer presence – vanishing, yet never gone. They are fragile, like dust on a surface, a suggestion, a quiet voice that could have been erased. Queer Traces are scattered survivals: from faint silhouettes to visible gestures, from evasion to assertion.
In Progress
2025 (since 2009)
Version 10: Herbarium Exitus
Version 10 of the Reliquary XX–XXI series is a herbarium of liminal images – thanatobotany, funeral flora, grave flowers, and herbarium exitus at once: dried fragments of botanical motifs found in the works of deceased artists. Plants here are not merely flora, but the semiotics of death – wreaths, wilted bouquets, ornamental patterns, withered stems – all become metaphors of post-memory. Like flowers, art is made for life, yet ends up laid upon the gravestone of culture. These images capture not only loss but a paradox: the artist who created a sign of vitality disappears, and their work – like a cultural herbarium – is preserved in an archive where life and decay are inseparably entwined.
In Progress
2025 (since 2009)
Version 11: East Blok
The eleventh reliquary in the Reliquary XX–XXI series assembles works by artists from Eastern Europe – a region historically bound to the themes of memory, trauma, and loss. In these works, death is not merely represented; it permeates form, gesture, and concept. Eastern European art often speaks from within the condition of mourning, treating history not as background but as wound. This reliquary does not catalogue a specific type of death, but rather presents a cultural landscape shaped by the persistent presence of disappearance – where art becomes a vehicle of commemoration and resistance. The “blok” is not only geopolitical, but memorial: an ossuary of images shaped by historical compression and existential intensity.
In Progress
2025 (since 2009)
Version 12: Belarusian Necrologue
The final installment of Reliquary XX–XXI narrows its focus to a single region – Belarus. This reliquary is dedicated to artists connected to the Belarusian context, whose names have been forgotten and whose works have been overlooked within the institutional histories of Eastern European art. Erased from the cultural map due to isolation and a repressive political regime, Belarus remains a blank spot even in academic research. And yet, paradoxically, death emerges as one of the most persistent themes in Belarusian art – not as mere mourning, but as a mode of memory, resistance, and the poetics of disappearance. In this sense, the reliquary becomes an act of restoration – an attempt to reconstruct an archive, gather scattered remains, and transform what has long been the last wagon of the Eastern European train into a possible locomotive. It is, above all, a Belarusian Necrologue: a commemorative gesture and a structural reclamation of those lives and artworks consigned to cultural silence.
In Progress
shabohin.org© Sergey Shabohin: Reliquary XX–XXI, 2009–2025 shabohin@gmail.com